1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus, and terminal apparatus for creating and printing print data in a cloud computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Applications (to be referred to as web applications) which, through a web browser installed in a client terminal, use a function provided by a web application server via a network have widely prevailed.
Recently, cloud computing services are also becoming popular. The cloud computing services provide, through a network, not only a web application but also the hardware environment of a web application server for operating the web application. Typical examples of the cloud computing services are Amazon Web Service provided by Amazon.com®, U.S.A. and Windows Azure® provided by Microsoft, U.S.A. Along with the proliferation of cloud computing services, even processing which has been conventionally implemented by installing a specific application in a client terminal is provided as a web application in the future. Even such processing is expected to become executable using only a web browser.
In this technical background, a method of providing, as a web application, a printer driver which converts document data created by an application into a data format (to be referred to as print data) interpretable and executable by a printing apparatus has been examined. By providing a driver application as a web application and cooperating with an existing document management web application, a printing apparatus having a web browser can directly perform browsing, selection, editing, and printing of a document centrally.
However, conversion processing from document data into print data, which is executed by the driver application, is expected to take a long time till the completion of execution upon accepting a request. In this processing, a time-out may occur in the web browser before the web application server sends back an HTTP response to the web browser after the completion of processing when the web application server accepts a print data conversion processing request by an HTTP request. When the web server is different from an application server which provides actual services, the time of processing by the application server may exceed the standby time of the web server, generating a time-out. The time-out is transferred as a response to the web browser.
An example of a conventional technique for preventing a time-out is a so-called polling method. According to this method, the web browser inquires the execution status of processing of the web application server in a predetermined time period during execution of the processing (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-022165). In polling, the web browser repeats transmission of an HTTP request and reception of an HTTP response in a predetermined period during execution of processing in the web application server. This prevents generation of a time-out, and pseudo-connection between the client and the web application server is maintained till the completion of processing.